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Bruce Damer – The Joys and Trials of Computer Collecting

by: Bruce Damer

Publication date: 2003-10-11

Topics: Bruce Damer, DigiBarn Computer Museum

Language: English

A presentation recorded at Vintage Computer Festival West 2003, which was held at Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. The event took place October 11-12, 2003.

Warning: this audio was recovered from a barely functioning videotape. Audio levels are often low, and there is significant noise. Included here is a raw version, as well as a version where we attempted to improve the audio (but it's still not great.)

Automated transcript:

So welcome to this session about computer collecting.

Is it a disease? Is it a hobby?

Is it taking over a nerd humanity?

Alan Lundell and myself co-founded the Digibarn Theater Museum a couple years ago now.

And I just wanted to tell you sort of the story of how this happened

because stories are what people like and what people remember.

And just, it'll maybe give you an idea of where this can lead

if you let it get out of control.

So we'll start with our--

apologies to Jeff.

We'll start with a little bit of PowerPoint here.

I totally agree with Jeff, by the way.

So DigiBarn Computer Museum.

This session is called "The Joys and Trials of Vintage

I almost wanted to call it, you know, like the cookbook,

"The Joy of Cooking," but I realized that there's a lot of

messed up dishes as a result.

So there are trials involved too.

So basically, the session's really about all the kinds of

things that happen to you when you set the goal of building a

large collection and in our case, a physical collection and

a virtual collection and then handling what happens to the

And then handling what happens, the sort of emergent chaos,

the Cambrian explosion that happens around a large

collecting, community-based collection,

rather than simply just a personal collection.

So these are the things that were in the program.

How do you spot the really quirky stuff

that handled the quirky people that

come with the quirky stuff?

Handle them to care for them.

They're the beloved brethren.

Not to disrespect them.

How to gracefully decline other offers, you know, the 300th offer,

Commodore 64s, PC Juniors, things like that.

You could say, "I'll build a PC Junior totem 60 feet high.

That's what I'll do."

You know, if you can't say no, that's what you're going to end up doing.

How to handle the press.

Believe it or not, there is a press around this.

There are writers.

There's one in this audience, Christine.

There are people who are studying us as archaeologists, anthropologists, and whatnot.

How to handle open houses without having the local constabulary show up.

Or the neighbors disown you.

How to keep it from breaking up your marriage or your relationship or terrifying your pets.

Things like that.

And how to do all of this whole thing without any budget, without any real, just in your

spare time.

how to document people who visit because people who, like me, someone comes and as soon as they arrive,

there's a burst, it's like a ketchup burst.

They'll see a machine and then this ketchup burst of memory happens and you try to record that.

And so I got one of these little things, a little memory stick digital recorder that dumps straight to MP3.

So minimize it. If you really want to record, do oral history, how to do it, and how to not let...

The worst thing that happens in this kind of thing is letting queues of chores pile up.

Like there's a huge, right now there's a huge stack of boxes of people who, stuff that's been shipped.

You really have to process those queues as best as they come in or you end up with,

your probably becomes this massive chore that you have to wait until you're 65 or retire and then you get to,

you know how like you process your slides and photos and you have a huge, you know, that whole thing.

And then how to create, because having a collection that's physically located somewhere is hardly, it's kind of nice.

But it's accessible by those people, in our case, who go on Bear Creek Road, get sick, take Altoids, manage to make it, and then come on a tour.

And a very, you know, very relatively few people, I think maybe three, four hundred people came last year.

Maybe two hundred and some came to the opening.

But really the virtual, Gordon Bell's words, the online virtual presentation of this material that is of value.

The artifacts in themselves are cool to see, but it's the online.

Then you get thousands or hundreds of thousands of people able to get this stuff.

So really how to build a good website.

And how to make it not look like a database supported website when it really has to have a database under it.

But if a database support a website kind of looks rigid and repeated.

In this case, I didn't put a website under it, which means everything's done by hand,

which is ridiculous, but on the other hand it's the most flexible.

You'll see that later.

And then how to one day grow up when you realize that you really are now operating as a repository,

as a heritage repository and you have a responsibility.

It starts from being this personal obsession and ends up being this is the only, my goodness,

this is the responsibility for future historians.

How do you then get to the preservation mission that say this institution has?

But as a private person, how do you start having accession forms, getting all your legal

stuff in order?

Do you have a nonprofit or not?

How do you get a little bit of funding to support documentary efforts?

How do you preserve the systems?

How do you keep them from being destroyed by weather and climate?

they are valuable or do you donate some of the pieces of an institution like this that can better preserve them?

So how did it all start? So that's what we're going to talk about.

Maybe we'll never get to any of that, but we started because I bought a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1998,

and there was this barn.

I thought, oh my God, it's a 5,000 square foot facility, cement floors, everything.

What do I do with a barn?

I'm not going to decide to raise pigs, and the pigs live out here.

But we don't have horses, and we're not going to do any of the horse thing.

And so what happened was one day, my friend Alan and I decided to go to the Weird Stuff warehouse.

And I had a few pieces of collecting.

I had done a lot of work with Xerox in the 1980s putting the star-like stuff onto PCs, under DOS PCs.

I wrote a whole graphical OS myself with windows and icons and all that stuff.

And you can see that upstairs.

The Elixir desktop, it's next to all the other, we have altos up there and stars and 6085s.

You can see all that. That's where my passion came from.

Oh my God, you know, how do I get an icon look and feel like a Xerox look and feel onto a DOS PC with 640K?

And I did that. Xerox sold that worldwide, still does.

And that's where I had the appreciation for the magnificence of what the Xerox PARC team had done and what the Xerox Corporation had done.

So for years I'd been searching for altos and things like that.

But it started with this innocent visit to the Weird Stuff warehouse where I spotted the beloved marshmallow-shaped televideo terminal,

which I had written a lot of code on an IMS S100 machine back in 1981-82.

And of course...

[unintelligible]

It's definitely weird.

So what we did was fill up...

I started buying this thing.

I think this was like $15 or $10.

I had to have it.

This is how it starts.

You can ask Salam.

Salam has a fantastic story about how he started.

Salam has thousands of pieces, an enormous warehouse.

So then we filled up the car, came back,

and found the best room in the barn, so the collection begun.

There it is there.

There's the exhibit, first exhibit A.

Then Alan had a great idea, which was,

we don't just want to have these machines sitting on the floor.

What we want to do is get them running,

because a lot of the life about these computers is when they ran,

the sounds of them, what they were showing, what people were doing,

and then try to capture that and put that on the web.

each little virtual exhibit of a machine we had some of the life of the machine coming out.

And, should we try the real thing here?

This was one of our first artifacts.

This was

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And at the time

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He custom made these. He made all these floppies and personalized them all.

And he did the graphics and then he mailed them all out to all the journalists and friends.

We'll see if we can...

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Clap, everybody clap.

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The red light is on.

We're going to show you some other artifacts later that have tremendous stories behind them.

Daniel Kottke's music computer.

Here we go.

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Now there's a little song on the end.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

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- So I think what we're going to do now

is run a little video back on the projector

I'll try to give you a physical tour and a virtual tour of the museum.

This tour actually was prepared for John Toole and the board of directors of this museum

just to sort of show what we're doing.

There's the pig.

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Oh why would you do something about that?

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>> Here it is.

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and your donations and your fingerless mail or number, and a few things to live here in the barn, and to buy here.

And then we'll move on to the food house.

This is my favorite.

It's a beautiful morning.

It gets my whole time of food experience.

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We can't feel our world in a completely different world.

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And so I wonder what happens with the audience.

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And now we have a dangerous, dangerous invasion.

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Water.

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I promise you that's sort of a remote physical tour of the DigiMarms.

It's even grown more and more.

There's been more and more contributions.

But next I want to talk about trying to create a virtual museum

to really share the collection.

That is a really major challenge.

There's many approaches to doing this.

A typical site will have just a long listing of systems.

This is what I have.

And I sort of looked at some of those sites and I thought,

well, that's kind of just--

there's got to be more to the story than that.

So I tried to, in sort of an emergent way, as this thing--

even how do you classify things?

This is an issue here at the Computer History Museum.

What is the taxonomic way to classify these artifacts?

And so I kind of took a very, very informal approach.

Stuff came in.

I said, OK, what do I call this class of artifacts,

How do I cross-relate it to other artifacts?

And I decided very early on, I was going to write a MySQL site.

And there's some wonderful database-backed sites

that show artifacts and whatnot.

But every page looks the same.

You have the statistics on the machine, a picture, et cetera,

et cetera.

So as you're going through it, you kind of

get into this repeated mode.

And you're kind of locked into what the database, what

your design produced.

And I thought, I really can't afford to lock myself in

because how you tell the story of personal computing

is really a wandering story of links.

It's a real Ted Nelson experience.

So for example, when someone comes

and has their ketchup burst and sees a system,

they start belting out all these facts and people,

and they start bringing documents and artifacts.

And I realized it's this tangled rat's nest

of interconnections.

So I decided to build the entire site completely by hand

so that I could put links anywhere

and make any page look funky in any way.

Because in fact, especially personal computing,

it's a funky industry.

Oh, it'll pick it up.

Thanks, John.

So anyway, the site--

then I thought, oh my goodness, how do people

navigate through all this stuff?

And I went back to the idea that if you have a database,

then you have a little entry field that says,

put in the name of the system that you want to figure.

find out about.

And the problem with all that is it's very hard to scan.

It's very hard to sit down with a cup of coffee or 10 cups

of coffee and say, I'm just going to explore, because then

you have to know what you want.

Well, often you don't.

You just want to--

people who come to the DigiBarn, it's a trigger.

It's like we call it a memory palace.

The idea of the memory palace in the Middle Ages or in the

Renaissance was a place you came and you saw an artifact

or something and brought a memory back.

This is a nerd memory palace.

So when people are walking through it,

they're doing this kind of random walk through it

and they're seeing things in a random order

and it's starting to pull the memories out of them.

So what I decided to do in the collection was simply,

and you may think this is terrible,

but list the entire thing,

and this is actually about a third of what we have,

but it's the most interesting stuff on a single page.

So what you can do,

This is like a broadsheet newspaper.

Go down it.

That's cool.

I'll jump off and explore that.

Oh, there's some video.

Oh, a song.

The IBM song is in there.

Oh, look.

What is that?

Oh, my god.

It's a cassette.

But oh, wow.

This is an example of someone randomly perusing

this single linear list.

And they see this.

They get to here and they, you know, we sent this to Paul Allen's archivist and they're saying,

"This could be one of the first releases of software between Microsoft and Apple."

So it's an artifact that's kind of interesting.

Albuquerque, New Mexico is probably produced in 1976 or '77.

And it's sent to Bandly Drive, stamped, Apple saw a base.

So it's like, "Oh, that's pretty strange."

So then there's a bunch of people looking at that.

So then what I did was I thought,

the brain now has to say cross-link, cross-link,

cross-link.

What's this related to on the rest of the site?

Mention a Bill Gates call on admits.

Because in this first issue of Byte,

they go on a road trip to find out--

Carl Helmers goes on this road trip

to find out if any of these people are real.

And the first place he goes is to spear a computer

in bountiful Utah.

And the founder of SPHERE actually

spoke here at the VCF several years ago.

That's a gentleman up there.

And then they ended up at the MIDS factory.

But then by going through this bite,

I found this little weird thing here, which was--

right here, it's talking--

they also have a very busy group of college types working

away at program development.

They're delivering basic now and about ready to let loose,

extend to basic.

And that's Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

So then it's-- that's a link that you pass through.

Oh, and there's another thing on the first issue of Byte

Magazine.

And gee whiz, you know, oh, there's a homebrew.

It's a homebrew newsletter.

And actually, this mentions Captain Crunch,

who set up an account at Call Computer in Palo Alto.

So people would dial in with their LTRs

and put store characters at 23 cents per K per month.

And then I said, wait a minute,

that's the first online community.

And anyway, so you can sort of see how the linking,

so the whole site is developed

to allow this exploration to happen.

So then after another cup of coffee,

they find themselves going back up to this

and then they keep on scrolling and then they see,

oh my goodness, they see maze war.

So what's that related to?

Oh, maze war.

And then what happened here, one of the things I wanted to take advantage of was the collective

curation or the collective history reporting of thousands of people.

So what happened was, this is a very good example, maze war is arguably the first multi-user

graphical 3D game that was coded on the Imlax in 1971-72 and ported to many, many platforms.

And it was an eyeball. You were an eyeball character in a maze going around shooting at other eyeballs.

And it was on the Alto, it was on Project Mac at MIT. It was an amazing thing.

It was the taproot of all multiplayer gaming.

And I didn't even know about it until somebody brought me this printout from a Xerox Star.

I scanned it and I said, "What is this?"

And then suddenly, in about three weeks, I started getting all this input.

Like a blog almost.

Suddenly all these people who were somehow googling Maze War,

I don't know why, out of the ether, it's a great game.

But there was almost nothing about Maze War on the net.

But suddenly I had about a dozen people who put the story together about Maze War.

And now we have a project with these people to resurrect Maze War

on a number of systems including the Alto.

It runs on a Palm OS.

And to do a big stage show at SIGGRAPH 2004

because it's the 30th anniversary of "Maze War."

And to do it with Lauren Carpenter's paddles,

where people in the audience can operate,

5,000 people can play "Maze War" in the audience at once.

She did that with Pong in 1994.

So this innocent little scan has led to an enormous amount of

self-generated input.

And one of the problems, of course, I have now

now is I have over 1,800 pages.

So each of those pages could draw a Google hit,

which could draw, unfortunately, an input from somebody

or a question.

So I've got this enormous--

once a month I have this huge stack of input

go through and either add their comment to the site,

or reply, or get them to write more.

And then each of those 1,800 pages starts to grow.

And then maybe in 10 or 20 years,

this will be an enormous resource for museums

and for people writing history.

And some of the amazing contributions I get is this guy in Holland

has over 3,000 screenshots of all user interfaces.

So he had nowhere to put them.

So he said, I'll send you a DVD of a gigabyte of snaps,

all versions of OS/2 warp, all the releases, all releases of Windows,

all releases of the Mac OS, Amiga, Video Toaster.

He spent years getting these screenshots from about 1982.

And so I said, I'll put them up.

And they're kind of just screenshots.

But you want to see Red Hat version 5 or 4 or 3.

They're all-- there's Windows 286.

That's actually running.

Windows 1.0 screenshot.

They're all here.

So that's an online contribution.

That's sort of a contribution.

Then another crazy thing started happening.

This goes on and on, folks.

There was a student in Canada who was doing a computer

sort of history research project,

and he had this original,

I don't know if you guys remember this bushy tree diagram.

This was published in 1984, '85 in IEEE.

It's sort of, there's a long history of trees and graphs

showing relationships.

One of the earliest ones is, sorry I'm just rolling around,

is this is the army large ENIAC on up to the 60s.

That's one of the first trees.

Gordon Bell is fanatical about these trees.

So what we decided to do as a team,

and doing a lot of the research, is attempt to update this

to the year 2000.

So we probably made tons of mistakes,

but this is the update of this to the year 2000.

And each of these things is a live link.

Everything goes to either a resource on the net

or some resource on the DigiBarn site.

You can use this as your way to follow through,

starting with MX and MX.

And I was able to luckily put my own system in there,

which hadn't been in that.

I hope it's not too much of a rewriting,

inserting of histories.

But now we get tons of comments on this.

Why are you missing something?

These are all visual systems, pretty much.

And then you should show the darker, stronger link

between Word and BravoX.

And there's somebody down here that said, why?

The thick line running from BravoX to MS Word.

So that's Daddymerd.

Go back here.

And then categorizing parts.

People care about the Microsoft RAM card.

There's a huge number of, something that's happened to us is this overflow of people will say,

"Here's five boxes of S100 cards."

Like, all right, now used to, in the beginning I actually paid money for these things.

I bought them on eBay for like, "Oh, I have to have that.

That's a C80 car, I'll pay $35 on eBay."

Now I've got crates of them until one day a guy emailed us, he lives in Watsonville,

and he said, "I have this very large S100 system that I'm just about to turf

until I found your page on Dwight Elvey

and the S-100 restoration we were doing.

And would you like to come and see it?

So I drive down there and in his horse barn

is a nine foot tall S-100 tower.

And I say, with big power supplies,

all beautiful, beautifully made system.

He said, "So what is this?"

He said, "It's the S-100 multi-processor.

It's a supercomputer made out of S-100 cards."

(audience laughing)

And I was about to send it to the Watsonville dump.

And I said, "I have boxes of these cards."

He'd thrown most of the cards away,

but now we're gonna get that

and just use it as a storage bin.

We're gonna put it next to the Cray supercomputer

to compare, this is $15 million in 1980 dollars,

that's Tony's Cray supercomputer.

And then here's the hobbyist version,

which costs about 200 grand to make.

And it's for specialized math functions.

You can have hundreds of processor boards in the thing

and it works.

Or it doesn't work now, but it worked at the time.

But the oddest thing,

and one of the things that just came in was this,

this is a Dave Boggs ethernet drop at Park

that they ripped out of the ceiling

and Ken Pierre gave it to me a couple months ago.

And that was probably gonna end up

just getting given away our turf,

But if you think about it, in 50 years,

this is the ethernet drop to the co-inventor of ethernet.

Right?

This says Boggs right there.

I think what this tells us is right now it's so much junk,

but in 50 years, people are actually gonna sort of discover

that this was a really important period of invention.

That the things that they're living with,

they're gonna care a lot more.

And that we as collectors, it is our mission

to preserve this, certainly the stories

and weird oddball artifacts so that when people do find that they care more about it, then they'll be there.

We'll have tons of audio and we'll have video of people talking.

They'll try to interrelate the people and the artifacts will exist.

Thanks to Gwen and Gordon Bell, we have incredible artifacts here that would have been thrown away.

There's Jeff Raskin's original first joystick, first ever joystick made for an Apple computer.

Windows 95 launch party shot scene.

Next slide.

Now here's another very odd artifact that Al will demonstrate.

[inaudible]

We have to push start on the end.

This is compute, calms you down.

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[ Laughter ]

[ inaudible question ]

[inaudible]

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So, thanks for Alan again.

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[ Inaudible ]

So Alan and I produced about two dozen shorts that you can go and see on the site on all kinds of topics.

Yeah, this is a great feature.

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[INAUDIBLE]

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[unintelligible]

That was actually from our opening, pretty exciting.

I think sort of a couple of final topics.

You know, you build these sites, media come.

I mean, nowadays, BBC have been there three times, and they want a weird funky.

It's interesting, the museum is sort of a non-museum.

We're not incorporated as a museum, it's a private collection.

We're probably going to incorporate as a nonprofit for the storytelling project.

But when you get a private collection and you want to incorporate as a 501(c)(3)

to help people a little tax write-off, it's really complex.

and you have to follow IRS rules. You can ask anybody here.

So we chose to keep it as a private collection,

but probably incorporate a non-profit around the Heritage Project.

What we hope to do is get things like Guggenheim grants and stuff like that.

A whole $5,000 and $10,000 grant, we could say go to Jeff Raskin,

who's offered to do this, and say, "We're going to tell Jeff Raskin's whole story.

We're going to scan stuff in. We're going to re-document Jeff's life.

This little micro-grant." So that's one of the initiatives that we're going to do,

and we're probably going to do a nonprofit around that.

Just so we can capture those memories,

we did the Alto panel here yesterday in order to try

to capture the vital -- I learned stuff

that I never thought I would learn

about what made the Alto special, and just capture that,

stick that online so anyone can immediately get it online

and people can listen to that and then comment on that

and then continue to add to that legacy.

What we hope to do is over 10 or 15 years, if I may only keep

going on this thing is to provide a vast, raw archive.

It's not curated.

It's not really fact-checked.

It's just raw so that folks at an institution like this

can draw from that and then start

to build a larger picture.

Historians can write books and things like that.

Beyond that, I mean, on the site, you'll notice--

we sort of start adding categories and categories.

After a while, the help section of what

What are we missing in terms of machines, the key machines that we're missing?

You just list what you still need and people come up with it.

It's incredible.

They come up and often you have to pay shipping.

We didn't need the nonprofit status for the collection because people just want a home

for these things.

Generally, I'll only accept a machine that was working when it was turned off and it

comes with a person who will help tell the story of it.

It's not just a random thing off of a loading dock.

[inaudible]

Alan has a theory that, like Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines,

he and I and our friends are going to be saved when the machines come with Arnold.

[laughter]

[inaudible]

Yeah, if you're in the barn when the TX arrives,

they're gonna look around, they're gonna be scanning,

but then they're gonna see their ancestors.

Like, you're gonna duck behind the pecometer pet 2001

and they'll just get emotional, right?

They won't be able to off you because you're caring

for the nursery of their ancestors, and we'll be safe.

So Arnold's working on that.

So I think, in a sense, this is one of the most fun things

I've ever done. I've met more people through this than all the businesses I've ever started or anything I've ever done.

And you're fantastic. People are fantastic. Some of them are really seasoned people, started companies, everything.

Some of them are people's kids that are really excited about this.

And it's just been probably the best hobby I've ever done.

And it does take over your life. So, you know, if you can have your spouse involved and believing in it,

It's a good thing.

Salam can tell you about all that.

I mean, Salam's the great kahuna of all this.

We sort of look at Salam as our guide in terms of how to do stuff.

And then what's very important in the collecting community is share and share alike.

We use the Creative Commons license for everything.

In intellectual property terms, you'll get a photograph or you'll get a document you

want to scan it and put it on the site.

When we worked with Larry Lessig at Stanford University,

he was developing with an institution there a license that isn't a copyright.

It allows permission to use something.

And it's locking things out of the public domain.

A lot of the stuff people care, companies don't care about it.

It's not of any commercial value.

What we do is they do and ask permissions later.

We apply the Creative Commons license, which allows non-commercial use of any picture.

If someone takes a picture and makes a derivative of it, like they mix it up, they have to issue

the mixed up picture with the same Creative Commons license.

If you're putting stuff online, and then we have an escape clause that we built, we designed,

we had it checked with lawyers that says if anything on the site belongs to you, contact

us and we'll follow your instructions.

it down or put your copyright notice on it, etc.

But it's really important to do something like that.

If you don't have some kind of a notice on your site, it's a lot more messy.

So I would encourage you to look at the digibarn.com site, look at how we've done our license,

and consider adopting it.

I think it's a very, very strong, it's on every page, oops, we're not online here, but

But it's a very strong license.

And generally, people don't care.

They don't care if you're reproducing materials.

An institution like Park does.

Park will give you permission to reproduce it.

But some institutions really care.

Defunct companies, who's ever really going to care?

So anyway, that's another part of doing a virtual collection.

We're starting to do weird things like producing 3D models

and Adobe atmosphere of a machine that opened it up

and put flash on it so that you can actually

look at an interface running.

Sort of a 3D walk through.

Flash, reproductions, all the video, all the audio,

as best we can use the tools as best are available.

And doing the openings and having people come in

and videotape and audio tape them and just continue.

Don't let the queue get too big.

Don't get too many unopened boxes pile up.

don't have too much audio to process, just process those cues.

If the cues get too big, you'll never get to it.

It'll be like big constipation of the mind, right?

I'll do it when I'm 65, and then your collection will--

your whole thing will freeze up, seize up.

So you can't retake in more than you can process,

but use any technologies you can to shorten the time,

like instant audio to MP3, and you're done.

Send it onto your site.

And the Digibarn project is a collective.

We host a lot of content from other people who couldn't find homes or put it on size

it up banner ads and pop-ups.

We'll put it on our site to keep it going.

And so there's maybe 50 or 60 people's different, different people's content, different museums

are in here as well.

And it's about 1.5 gigabytes of compressed actually, compressed it this morning, of information

right now.

So it's probably about three gigs now of information.

And eventually, you get on TV.

I was on CBS Morning News in May for an anniversary of the

Xerox Star.

Dave Canfield-Smith was on the same program.

And it's really fun.

Go to New York and go in a studio and get recorded.

It's a really fun thing to do.

Salaam, of course, is always on the news, too.

So I guess we should open it up.

We're the last speakers, so I guess we're not going to get

kicked out right away.

So maybe we should open up to questions for Alan and myself.

I want to acknowledge Galen Brandt, my partner over here,

who has been an incredible supporter of this project

and hasn't disowned me.

And thank you very much.

[

USE]

And Alan for making all this tremendous media

and being a partner in the museum project.

And with that, we can open it up to some questions.

Comments?

Jeff?

Oh, interesting.

[Music]

[Loudletting]

So the Canon cat probably didn't have a fan either.

But the Canon cat--

yeah.

Questions or comments?

Back here.

It's actually more primitive than that.

I ought to do a wiki.

What I've got is a submit form and little check box as to

they want it on the site.

What you have to do, be careful.

Over the last two years, they've developed this.

They have to opt.

They tell you, do you want it on the site?

Do you want it in the blog, which is just, I do by hand.

Do you want your name associated with it?

Do you want your email address associated with it?

You have to let people opt in

through the different representations

of what they're contributing.

And then I just take this huge stack of things

every week or every month and I just put it,

because I have to use my, my brain is the database.

I have to say, okay, where does this fit?

This fits under the description of the system,

But oh, it also fits over here, if it's in the general blog.

So I may distribute their comments several places.

Yeah, it might be.

I actually need help in trying to figure out

how to layer something like that over top of all this stuff.

[ Inaudible ]

I do have an issue with the people who have their own content on the site.

One of the problems is that they have access to those subsections,

and they maintain them, but the cross-linking of,

they put something up that's relevant to another thing,

how do you put a link in there.

Interestingly enough, one of the people we've done some work with

is James Burke, the guy who did the Connections series.

And he's, we're doing a, there's a number of people,

I see Santa Cruz doing a project called the K-Web,

and it's trying to develop a technology that

can allow this linking stuff to be done through people

and their relationship.

And after that is done, I've told James

what we want to do, supply all this stuff to recently living

people who helped make the digital era come to life,

so that we can build all that platform

underneath the entire effort.

And James is pretty excited about that,

because he's focused on hundreds of years ago.

The current project is focused on late at the time of Mary Shelly and things like that.

He's got 3,000 biographies that he researched to try to create connections to find out who was--

were they both in Venice at the same time and therefore they met.

So that's something that's percolating.

Question here?

Yes, what we're going to do on the tour is as soon as we manage to get--

and you could already be-- if you have a vehicle, you could be very helpful.

We actually have to take all the Xerox machines, put them in various vehicles,

and then we're going to drive over to the Digibar, which is about 45 minutes drive from here.

And probably leaving as soon as we get the stuff packed up,

so it could be like 3.30 or 4 o'clock.

and you just, I'll draw quick maps,

but it's not that hard to find.

It's windy, you've got your altoids.

But that will allow you to come in.

We've recently cleaned up.

We've told the pigs to be on their best behavior.

And then you can come on a personal tour today.

And then maybe we can go to Boulder Creek,

and it's a cute little town,

and go to the brewery or something for dinner later.

But you're all very welcome to join us.

And what I would suggest is just rendezvous,

if you want to come, rendezvous upstairs at our area,

which is where all the Xerox machines are,

the DigiBurn banners in an hour or something like that.

And bring your vehicle-- if you have a vehicle,

it will be a plus.

Question here?

Yeah, we have an excellent QX10.

I'm looking for Valdox for it.

Larry Niven, interestingly enough, a science fiction

writer, he and Jerry Purnell pounded out Lucifer's Hammers

and several other of their books on Valdox on the QX10.

Yeah, so I told them I would try to get a system running

for the next time they were up.

[ Inaudible ]

[ Laughter ]

This is what Alan used to attract women jogging on the beach.

So again, if you do have an odd, you're a collector, so you're probably not having stuff in your garage to give out.

But if you have something very odd or something that really has an interesting story behind it,

we do also have to some extent a loan program where we'll take stuff people who it doesn't

make sense for it to be in a garage and we'll exhibit it. This is Daniel Kottke's music computer

as an example. It's something he's loaned us so that we can at least show it and tell its story.

But it stays in his ownership. We do that to some extent as well. But we can actually issue

no guarantee that the problem is of security.

It's a barn.

How do you secure a collection like this?

Well, for most people, hauling off this stuff

doesn't really mean a whole lot.

The pigs are great to watch pigs.

But this stuff really isn't that valuable.

I mean, if you look on eBay and things like Altair selling

for thousands of dollars and whatnot,

I suppose that has some value.

but most of the stuff is of that interest to the general public.

Question in the back?

The challenge of exhibiting this stuff is a really major issue.

What we've done is generally, I mean, you saw the whole layout.

You've either got a table at eye level or low level that people can sit down at.

Machine, machine, machine, machine, machine.

What tends to be interesting is the artifacts that surround the machine,

the machine is running, that someone can sit down, load some code, and operate it.

That's of interest.

What we tend to have found is that visitors, as they come,

they'll bring stuff and they'll put the artifact next to the machine where it should go.

So it's sort of self-exhibit.

And then, you know, like somebody came and put David Aul's picture above a certain machine.

And I recorded why that mattered.

So that stays there and we took a picture of that.

And so the whole thing has been populated.

Oh, this t-shirt goes with that.

And the story is so...

I then record the story and as the...

especially the lineage room that you saw, the first room you saw me walking around,

it's become a richer and richer story because now I know that the 50...

Why is the IBM 5120 sitting next to the IBM 5150?

What's the great story between IBM's last personal computer that they built in 1978

and the 5150 which they outsourced?

And so the walk through this room, if you want the full story, is now really slow.

Because there's so much to tell between the linkages between the machines

and the artifacts associated.

It can take an hour to get through that room

because the density contribution of story plus artifacts that are now plastered all over the place.

So I don't know, maybe that is the canonically best way.

It's traces, it's walkthrough storytelling traces through these systems that somehow link them.

It's a very oral, very verbal thing. It's very strange.

Because the artifact only carries so much information,

But the stories interwoven are really what is interesting.

[ Inaudible ]

And if we don't tap this treasury in the next decade,

we're going to lose a huge part of it.

I think that that's the urgency.

The story is simply going to be lost.

As each person leaves us, the amount

of value in terms of the story is gone.

It's almost totally immeasurable.

So any of you, if you record a little snippet

like with something like this, that whole panel yesterday,

And then what I did is I followed like a puppy dog behind those park people

and I was like poking this in their ear and capturing all this other stuff.

It's very raw, but in ten more years these people may be completely unavailable to us.

And the story will be lost forever.

Because it's very hard to piece together the whole personal carrier wave of this history

from documents and artifacts.

It's really hard to do that.

Virtually impossible, I think.

So, Jeff has a question.

Yeah, in fact, one of the--

I'm an engineer by training, and when I read some--

I look at some of the so-called official histories,

You just know in your heart of hearts that the thing has been totally candy coated and simplified for the media.

And we saw this happening when BBC television was there.

It was incredible.

They were video, this presenter, you know, they only have a limited amount of time.

They've got to present a story that's attractive to the audience.

That's their goal.

And this is BBC who are pretty good.

I mean, US media forget it in a lot of cases.

But, BBC started.

Well, the presenter was up and Alan, myself, and Daniel.

Daniel was the person being interviewed.

But they were doing their rehearsal.

And Daniel, Kaki, and Alan, and myself were listening.

And they were saying, it's 1980.

And Apple has just launched the Apple 2.

And Microsoft is just blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I walked over and said, excuse me, that's all

completely wrong.

What are you trying to do?

Well, we're trying to compare and contrast what was happening

at that time, because it's a drama and it's exciting.

But you're reading wrong history.

Not when Daniel came over and said, "Guys, the Apple II was launched at such and such."

And then I said, "Look, Apple was going public. That was a big deal. Raised a lot of money.

And Microsoft was getting ready to, it was acquiring QDOS and was working with IBM,

sort of behind the scenes. That's the truth. Those were the two most, those were two powerful stories.

Well, that's not dramatic enough.

It doesn't show Bill Gates competing with Steve Jobs head on head like in a boxing ring.

No, they were working in their own orbit.

So the media is always trying to put spins on things.

And so one of the things in, so that's what they do.

Robert Cringley I think has done an excellent job overall.

He's at least gone out and interviewed the people.

But that aside, one of the goals of the Digibarn is that

you have engineers, salespeople, parents, kids, all

the people from the ground up who really worked the long

hours to build this thing up to tell the story.

And their stories are fascinating.

Their stories confound any of the simple explanations.

Anything.

People moved from company to company.

They knew everybody.

It wasn't a camp of Apple versus Microsoft or IBM.

It wasn't such camps.

It can't be simplified in that way.

And it's the story of the ground up people that is being largely lost.

I mean, the park people, you'd think they'd be household names and they're not.

But even just somebody comes in and said, like when they were talking yesterday,

1974 I came and I saw this thing called the Alto and I used it and I, you know,

the first, that's such a precious moment.

A kid coming in at 12 years old, sitting down in front of an Alto,

and doing the mouse thing and learning how

to run something on the Alto.

That's like one of the first human beings, a young mind,

that's engaging in the system that's visual.

And those are astounding moments that are lost.

But as an adult, they give you this very crystal clear

impression of what the Alto was.

It was like a magic box.

It's like that screen, the fact that you could

see pixels on the screen.

I remember one person describing to me

is an electric Etch-a-Sketch.

That was their impression of the thing.

Because the Etch-a-Sketch was kind of--

it was almost like a pixelated interface.

And so it's these things that we're trying

to grab before they're gone, the things that really

put the meat into the story.

And--

[INAUDIBLE]

And so with that, are there some more questions?

I know we're getting on here in time.

From this illustrious audience.

You are the converted, after all.

I mean, certainly there are people

who tell me I'm completely nuts.

They should

So I guess one more question here

Yeah, the Cray the cables were cut it was from Lawrence Livermore labs, it's yeah came

It's a well someone offered me. I have a power distribution cabinet and

Someone offered me can do the diesel generator set for the Cray

Which weighs tons.

And so I mean it's the ultimate cray collector in the world is Jim Currie who has a barn with about 15 of these things in it.

And he just had to move. Can you imagine that?

He had to move, he moved from near Chippewa Falls to Indiana.

He's a UPS freight pilot by day.

And so he flies these giant freighters, but then he gets a week on and a week off.

So in the week off, he built a whole barn and he started collecting Cray supercomputers and C90s and you name it, he's got it.

And then they had to move to Indiana.

[unintelligible]

And sitting on the bench seat of the Cray is a Pentium 300 motherboard,

been told is equivalent in terms of matrix processing ability,

which is worth about $30.

I think it's $20 today.

But well, come visit us.

If you can't visit today on this convoy we're going to do,

just go to the site, fill in a form, say I want to visit,

and we'll get you in the next round

if you want to contribute words, stories, artifacts, whatever.

Just send me, and I'll get to the huge stack of forms

at the end of the month.

If you want to help technologically with the website and putting infrastructure under it, it would be much appreciated.

Addeddate: 2023-12-11 21:53:22

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Year: 2003

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